"text processing" entries

GIF It Up — very clever remix campaign to use heritage content—Friday is your last day to enter this year’s contest, so get creating! My favourite.

Uber’s Drivers: Information Asymmetries and Control in Dynamic Work — Our conclusions are two-fold: first, that the information asymmetries produced by Uber’s system are fundamental to its ability to structure indirect control over its workers; and second, that Uber relies heavily on the evolving rhetoric of the algorithm to justify these information asymmetries to drivers, riders, as well as regulators and outlets of public opinion.

Exploring the power and sophistication of awk.

I maintain GNU Awk. As part of making releases, I have to create a patch script to convert the file tree of the previous release into the current one. This means writing rm commands to remove any files that have been removed. This is fairly straightforward using tools like find, sort, and comm.

However, for the 4.1.2 release, I also changed the permissions (mode) on some files. I want to create chmod commands to update these files’ permission settings as well. This is a little harder, so I decided to write an awk script that will do this for me.

Let’s take a look at some of the sophistication and control you can achieve using awk, such as recursion, the use of arrays of arrays, and extension functions for using operating system facilities.

This script, comptrees.awk, uses the fts() extension function to do the heavy lifting. This function walks file trees, building up a representation of those trees using gawk‘s arrays of arrays.